Pros

One of the best websites for automating small tasks.
Supremely easy to understand and use.
Supports dozens of apps and services.
Excellent and clear interface.
Free.

Cons

Some automations take longer than others to take effect.
No warning flags if a channel is deactivated but used in a current recipe.

Bottom Line

'If this, then that' shortens to ifttt, and that's all you need to remember because this amazingly simple yet powerful service can automate just about anything else, from backing up your photos on Facebook to sending you text message reminders of upcoming appointments.

14 Mar 2016Jill Duffy

Post a new photo to Facebook, and automatically save it into Dropbox. Receive an email from a new contact, and see that person's information appear in a spreadsheet. Anyone can create automations like those two I just mentioned if they use IFTTT. IFTTT (it rhymes with "gift") stands for "if this, then that." This free service is one of my favorite productivity apps because it lets you connect a wide variety of Internet-connected apps, services, and devices, even if you don't know how to code. The IFTTT website and mobile app show you how to build commands (which IFTTT calls recipes) using icons and a few simple fields. Once your recipes are in place, you can kick back and relax because IFTTT follows through on what it promises to do. Zapier is a similar service, and in my eyes both it and IFTTT are equally handy. You can do things with each that you can't do with the other, as I'll explain. Both Zapier and IFTTT are Editors' Choice services.

Getting Started With IFTTTAnyone can sign up for a free account on IFTTT. To get started, you have to authenticate the apps and services that you want IFTTT to be able to reach, such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, email, SMS, Dropbox, LinkedIn, and even smart home devices, such as the Philips Hue light bulb and Amazon Echo. IFTTT can also pull data from weather apps, stock tickers, and dozens of other services. The number of services supported is quite large.

The company announced recently it is working on a premium service that will be available for a fee, although details haven't yet been released. As of this writing, IFTTT remains completely free to use.

IFTTT's main competitor, Zapier, has both a free level of service and paid premium tiers of service. Prices start at $15 per month. With a free account, Zapier can run up to 80 tasks per month. Free users can only have five "zaps" (Zapier lingo for automations) active at any given time, and they run every 15 minutes. Free users are prohibited from running zaps on any services designated "premium apps" (MySQL, PayPal, Quickbase, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Zendesk, and several others), and they also miss out on Autoreplay, a kind of failsafe measure for when a zap doesn't run when it should.

Creating RecipesCreating recipes in IFTTT is extremely simple, as long as you stay within the service's confines. What I mean by that is IFTTT remains easy to use as long as you draw upon functions and commands that are already baked into the service. And there are plenty of great IFTTT recipes from which to choose. If, however, you come to IFTTT with a very specific new recipe you want to create, it can be a little trickier to use.

Premade recipes, however, are easy as pie to use. People who use IFTTT can make their recipes available to others, and using them takes nothing more selecting one, turning it on, and making sure the applicable apps or services are connected. You can find these automations under the Browse section of the site. An example—if it's going to rain tomorrow then send me a text message—is the recipe that started the whole site, as I learned when I interviewed IFTTT founder Linden Tibbets.

Creating a recipe from scratch can be trickier. For example, let's say I want to back up photos I take from my iPhone to Dropbox. I search for iOS Photos and find I can use "take any new photo" as my "if." Then for my "then that," I select Dropbox. My choice of actions (see below) is complicated. I don't want to create a text file, and I don't want to append a text file, so I guess I want the first option: add file from a URL. But I don't know what URL to provide.

Or let's say I want to save all iPhone photos to a specific Dropbox folder, and I want to exclude screenshots. It's possible to write that recipe, but it's difficult if you come from the "I just want it to work" camp.

Luckily, there are a lot of recipes with this same level of granulaity already created and made public by other people using IFTTT. It's easier to use their recipes than write your own from scratch. Whenever I look through IFTTT's suggested recipes, I always find automations that would make my digital life so much easier and richer, but that I wouldn't have thought to create on my own. The recipe repository is a marvelous place to explore.

IFTTT lets you enable, disable, and tweak recipes after you have created them. You can turn them on or off whenever you like without deleting the recipe from your file. An activity log shows you not only the recipes you've created and when you toggled them on and off, but also other factors that might affect IFTTT's ability to perform the function, such as failed API calls. Note that recipes don't always immediately take effect; that's the one drawback to this service. If you set up a recipe and then test it directly afterwards, it might not work, and you'll wonder if it's a flawed recipe or if the connections just haven't gone through yet.

IFTTT limits you to connecting two services with any one recipe, but Zapier allows more than two. If you want more than one action to happen as the result of your trigger, then you're better off using Zapier. For example, using Zapier, I was able to set up a command that goes like this: If I receive an email attachment in Gmail, then create a new task in the to-do app Todoist and create a card in my kanban board on Trello. IFTTT, on the other hand offers its full functionality at the free level, and it offers a lot more in the way of home-automation controls.

Mobile Apps and 'DO' ButtonsMobile apps make it possible to turn your recipes on and off no matter where you are, as well as creating new ones while you're on the go. IFTTT has another set of mobile apps that bring new functionality, broadly called "DO." Three DO mobile apps (for iOS and Android), called DO Button, DO Camera, and DO Note basically give you a new set of if triggers for recipes carried out on your mobile devices.

Let me first explain the DO Button app. Basically, the app is a virtual button, and when you press button, it is your "if" trigger for recipes you enable. For example, "If I press the DO button, then start tracking my time spent in a Google Spreadsheet." Another example: "If I press the DO button, then dim the lights on my Philips Hue smart light bulb."

The other two apps, DO Camera app and DO Note, let you quickly do perform a preset function with photos you take and notes you make. With DO Camera you might automatically share your photos to Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter, or save them to a desired storage space. DO Note similarly lets you make a quick note and save it to your location of choice, whether that's Evernote, email, a to-do app, or somewhere else.

Does IFTTT Work?All the recipes I've created and tried, including those that use SMS messages, have worked, although some took longer than others to take effect, but that's the only issue I've had with this otherwise phenomenal site. IFTTT is a PCMag Editors' Choice, and so is its competitor Zapier. They are both equally strong, handy tools, and each does at least one thing the other does not. IFTTT supports smart home appliances and has the DO apps, while Zapier lets you connect more than two services in a single command.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio